RELATIVISM

Knowledge, truth, and morality, the history of relativism Relativism has often been criticised as a threat to rational debate. Professor Martin Kusch and his colleagues aim to explore the historical roots of modern forms of relativism, and to determine which forms of the doctrine deserve a sympathetic reconstruction and defense The emergence of

relativism as a philosophical viewpoint was accompanied by a fair amount of criticism, with many philosophers arguing that it threatened to undermine the foundations of morality or knowledge. While relativism itself is difficult to precisely define, some core elements are clear. Consider epistemic relativism, the main focus of the Emergence of Relativism project.

“It’s first commitment is to the thought that ‘epistemic judgements’ – judgements concerning the question of whether a belief qualifies as knowledge – are always relative to a set of standards or principles. Such standards or principles tell you what it takes for a belief to be knowledge (e.g. which instrument is reliable),” says Professor Martin Kusch, the Principal Investigator of the project. “The second ingredient of epistemic relativism is that there is – or could be – more than one set of standards or principles, say in different cultures or different historical periods. And the third element is the thought that none of these sets of standards is ABSOLUTELY correct.

In the eyes of many critics, relativism undermines the thought that disagreements can always be resolved and decided by rational debate and discussion. “Relativism raises the spectre of us getting to a point where we just have to say; ‘well, this is right from your point of view, and this is right from mine.’ That’s the worry – that relativism undermines rational engagement with one another, and therefore also potentially undermines the pillars on which democratic societies are based,” explains Kusch. The historical thesis behind the project is that relativism as we understand it today is a child of German-speaking philosophers

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and scientists from the 19th and early 20th centuries. “We have focused on the timeperiod when you find the first inklings of this modern understanding, in people like Herder, and we have traced it through to the 1920s and ‘30s, when our modern understanding of relativism is well established,” says Kusch. But the project is not just historical: “We also investigate whether one can give a sympathetic rendering of relativism; we want to test which of its many versions might be defensible.”

trying to understand how and why, in the 19th century, certain forms of relativism emerged, and how they spread and became a matter of concern,” he explains.

Philosophical research How can one defend epistemic relativism?

One important area here is the history of science. It has been argued by some relativistically-minded philosophers that it is a graveyard of epistemic standards. Scientists have often modified or dropped even their

Relativism raises the spectre of us getting to a point where we just have to say; ‘well, this is right from your point of view, and this is right from mine.’ That’s the worry – that relativism undermines

rational engagement with one another Definition and emergence The wider goal of this research is to explore the history of relativism and to develop a sympathetic rendering of the position. The problem is that there have been few such sympathetic renderings. And thus, it has been the CRITICS of relativism who have been most prominent in defining what the position actually entails.

Concerning the historical side of the project, Kusch stresses that “there has been a considerable philosophical preoccupation with relativism since the end of the 19th century: yet if you go back to philosophers like Kant or Hegel two centuries ago, relativism doesn’t even feature as a distinct philosophical view. It hadn’t even been identified conceptually.”

Kusch and his colleagues study the causes behind the emergence of relativism. “We’re

most cherished epistemic standards in order to make sense of processes in the natural world. “Some philosophers have been so impressed by these fundamental changes in epistemic standards, that they have come to doubt that there is ultimately but one single correct system of norms for forming beliefs about the natural world,” says Kusch.

In particular, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is central for understanding the emergence of relativistic themes in the history and philosophy of science. “Kuhn pointed out that scientific work is conducted differently in different scientific communities – and that different scientific communities use different paradigms, model achievements which they follow,” outlines Kusch.

‘Paradigm’ was of course Kuhn’s central idea.

It has two meanings. One is that of a model

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achievement, as when, during the ‘Chemical Revolution’, Lavoisier analysed water with great precision, and identified its two elements. The second meaning of ‘paradigm’ was a set of assumptions, standards, and the aforementioned exemplary achievements.

“So science is always conducted within the system of norms and models of how to do scientific work,” Kusch explains.

The relativistic dimension of Kuhn’s paradigms become visible, once we take into account change. These paradigms may change over time, as new research emerges which challenges the previously accepted viewpoint. Kuhn argued that as standards of evaluation are internal to a given paradigm, there is no neutral point from which different paradigms can be compared. “This idea, though much criticised, is one important source of relativistic views,” says Kusch. Kuhn’s work was also influential in the sociology of science, another area of interest to Kusch and his colleagues. They seek to reconstruct the relativistic arguments that surface in these debates and fields, and test their plausibility and validity. Here they take into account influential contemporary criticisms and defences of epistemic relativism. Especially important here are recent developments in epistemology and feminist philosophy. For example, some feminist philosophers think that different groups – e.g. genders – have different ‘epistemic standpoints’, none of which is absolutely correct.

Historical research “Kuhn and other researchers suggested that norms of scientific enquiry changed throughout history. In our historical work we have tried to show that such themes already appeared in the 19th century, primarily in German-speaking philosophy and science,” Kusch continues.

“Thus we have looked at the tradition of German historical writing. How did German historians of the 19th century argue for – or presuppose – ideas concerning the relative or absolute status of moral and epistemic norms?

And how did they think about changes in the norms of historical writing?”

In the early 19th century, history was often regarded as a positive source of selfunderstanding and education, of fostering a national identity. It was thought that history was a guide to the correct way of understanding oneself and the world. This changed towards the end of the 19th century. “Historians increasingly looked in detail at different cultures, and different historical stages of their own culture. The historians came to feel that they should not analyse different historical periods by how rational or irrational they were – but rather try to explain and understand why people in different historical periods thought what they did,” says Kusch.

This change in method, and the loss of certainty in historical work, led to relativistic themes gaining prominence in history as a field. “So from being the source of reassurance – that we are going towards an ever-deeper understanding of ourselves in the world – history actually became a source of relativistic worries,” outlines Kusch.

The late 19th century also saw the emergence of sociology as a field of study.

One important figure in the field was the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel. He was interested in how different communities organise their knowledge and moral practices. Simmel was one of the first authors to systematically develop and defend epistemic relativism. Simmel is often thought to be part of the tradition of the ‘philosophy of life’. This school of thought maintained that thought and knowledge need to be understood as processes within human (social) life. It has its origins in Nietzsche and it later became part of Nazi ideology. Many positions within this tradition leaned towards relativism.

Relativism The Emergence of Relativism -Historical, Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives Project Objectives

The main objectives of this project are to: (1) retrace the intellectual history of the emergence of important forms of relativism (and the counterpart versions of antirelativism) in 19th and early-20th-century German-speaking philosophy and science; (2) explain some key junctures of this intellectual history in sociological terms; and (3) critically evaluate the central arguments for and against relativism as they evolved in the period under investigation, and as they have been developed further in more recent discussions.

Project Funding

This project is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant - ERC-AG-SH4 - The Human Mind and its complexity. 2.5 million euros.

Project Participants

• Dr Natalie Ashton • Dr Katherina Kinzel • Katharina Sodoma • Dr Robin McKenna • Dr Johannes Steizinger • Niels Wildschut

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Martin Paul Heinrich Kusch Professor of Philosophy of Science and Epistemology University of Vienna.

Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria T: +43 1 4277 46422 E: martin.kusch@univie.ac.at W: https://emergenceofrelativism.weebly.com

Outreach Kusch and his colleagues are also eager to bring their results to bear on the contemporary world beyond academia. “For example, in our blog we investigate the relationship between our research and political concerns around ‘alternative facts’, or relativistic challenges to scientific authority,” he says.

Professor Martin Paul Heinrich Kusch

Professor Martin Paul Heinrich Kusch was born in Leverkusen (Germany) in 1959. He studied in Berlin, Jyväskylä and Oulu (Finland) from 1979 until 1989.

He held academic positions in Oulu, Toronto, Auckland, Edinburgh, Helsinki and the University of Cambridge (where he was Professor for Philosophy and Sociology of Science. Since 2009 he has been Professor for Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna. He is married with three children.

www.euresearcher.com

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